Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Come meet me in Chicago! Mini2b and I will be spending Wed and Thurs, April 15-16 taking the PRD Miniatures workshop to make this incredible Mid-Century Modern room box. Space is limited so sign up and join us! Here are all the workshop details:

"Students will participate in the assembly of a 15”d x 15”w x 11”h mid-century modern room box and select from a variety of finishing materials to complete the inside of the structure. The room box will feature lighting, a window wall with interior access, and a fireplace. Included are hands-on instruction for setting up the recessed can lighting, installing a fireplace with actual flickering lights, installing flooring material and applying a variety of finishes to the interior wall spaces and fireplace surround. The finished room box will be a perfect prelude to shopping the Chicago International Show for your own furnishings and accessories. A box will be provided for transporting or shipping the finished room box. Reservations must be received by April 1, 2015."

Saturday, October 4, 2014

It is with much regret to inform you that my prices in my shop are about to have a HUGE increase. Shapeways used to base their prices on a start up fee plus a fixed price per cubic inch of material used. As of October 7th they are implementing a new pricing structure that includes labor, material volume and machine space. The new pricing structure lowers the cost of material used but drastically increases the cost based on the size of the model. For small pieces the prices are dropping but for modelers (train scale, 1:24, 1:12 scale) we are seeing double and triple+ the costs. Shapeways made the announcement 2 nights ago with one weeks notice until the changes hit. I have been scrambling to see if there is any way to make my furniture more affordable by the new rules to no avail. My designs need to be 1mm thick to be true to scale and structurally solid. I have spent the last 2 years perfecting my designs to meet the old requirements to use the least amount of material that results in the highest quality pieces, but now the rules have changed. My goal was to make affordable, high quality, modern furniture and decor that is not available elsewhere. Now I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I think the prices they are asking are ridiculous.

If you have ever wanted one of my bookshelves, side tables, chairs or collections, you have until Monday, October 6th to buy at my reasonable prices. On Oct 7th all of my larger items will be hit with Shapeways new increases from $10 - $40 each. Enjoy the prices before the increases at my shop: https://www.shapeways.com/shops/modernminihouses

The sets in Collections will jump in price as now there will be a labor charge per piece in the set, so there won't be a discount buying all the pieces in a collection. They will cost the same as buying each piece individually.

My dining tables will be $2-4 cheaper, so don't buy one now. Some of my vases will be 0.10 to 0.15 cents cheaper but most are increasing $1 or more.

Shapeways has been working on the pricing structure for 2 years, and supposedly designs like mine have been losing them money, but I'm furious that they never mentioned anything about a broken price structure and now we have one week to adjust to their drastic changes. There's more info on the Shapeways forum on this topic with over 13 pages of comments from frustrated designers lamenting the price changes in the last 2 days. Sigh. I'm pretty torn up over the changes but I'm still committed to designing affordable modern miniatures. I will be looking into other options, but it may mean only designing small decor items and not larger furniture pieces. I guess a good thing couldn't last forever.